Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Read by Edoardo Ballerina

15 hours, 23 minutes

Published July 2024 by Random House Publishing

Publisher's Summary: 

“Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?”

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.

My Thoughts: 

I saw this one on numerous best-of-2024 lists (and have heard great things about Brodesser-Akner's Fleishman Is In Trouble) so I requested it from the library. It ended up being a read/listen combination because I struggled with this one and my loan timed out. 

The book opens with the kidnapping and return of Carl Fletcher and the immediate aftermath. It's fast paced and drew me in immediately. And then we moved to sections about each of his children as grown adults. To say they were screwed up is an understatement. Reading Beamer's story was, for me, very uncomfortable and a little disturbing and I almost gave up on the book before I finished reading his part. If something bad could possibly happen, it did; but each of the kids (and their mother and grandmother) brought a lot of it on themselves. I began to feel less and less sorry for these people. I get that their lives had been irrevocably changed with the kidnapping, but I couldn't help but feel that at least one of them might have overcome it all. 

There was a part of me that really hoped that things wouldn't work out for them. That they would all have to learn how to get real jobs and live like normal people. But, of course, rich people hardly ever have the roof fall entirely in on them and this story is no exception. The thing that saved this one for me was that Brodesser-Akner had a couple of surprises up her sleeve that totally took me by surprise and I always do like a book that can surprise me. 

Life: It Goes On - July 13

Happy Sunday! What a noisy week we've had here between several nighttime thunderstorms that woke us up and work being done in the kitchen for three days. One night we had no water in the kitchen, the next we had no stove or microwave, every thing that's normally in the top drawers or out on the counters is in boxes in the dining room. I don't know how people survive months long renovations! 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers. Next up is Robert Edsel's The Monuments Men...I think. At least I'm going to start it on audio, but I'm wondering if it might be one I'd be better off reading digitally. 

Watched: The first season of Running Point, a couple of episodes of Only Murders In The Building, and Wicked. 

Read: I'm still reading Elin Hilderbrand's Summerland, but I'm going to have to get that one finished up soon because Friday I picked up Fredrik Backman's My Friends, which I'm anxious to get to. I wanted to get the audiobook version but I'd be waiting months for it yet. 

Made: I haven't cooked a single thing all week! The Big Guy cooked a couple of nights and we've eaten out the rest of the week. 

Enjoyed: Guys, I picked out the materials for our kitchen weeks ago and since then I've been afraid that I wouldn't like them or they wouldn't look good. Now that everything is in, it makes me so happy to walk into my kitchen! 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: It's not that we weren't planning on painting the kitchen walls, but now that the new tile is up, I'm going to have to paint sooner than later. Luckily we already have the paint so we can get started today. 

Thinking About: Paint colors for the cabinets. Because we can't stop once we've started! 

Feeling: Not as relaxed as I had expected to feel after a four-day weekend. When I scheduled these days off, there was nothing on the calendar and I thought it would be a nice, quiet time. Instead, because BG was off visiting clients the better part of the time people were here, I had to be "on" AND it was non-stop noisy for the big chunks of the past three days. I'm going to need to schedule another long weekend soon. 

Looking forward to: Book club this week, where we'll be discussing Remarkably Bright Creatures. 

Question of the week: Now that we've past the half way point of the year, what's your favorite book so far in 2025? 

Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century by Peter Graham

Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century by Peter Graham

384 pages

Published May 2013 by Skyhorse Publishing

Publisher's Summary: On June 22, 1954, teenage friends Juliet Hulme—better known as bestselling mystery writer Anne Perry—and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a New Zealand park with Pauline’s mother, Honora. Half an hour later, the girls returned alone, claiming that Pauline’s mother had had an accident. But when Honora Parker was found in a pool of blood with the brick used to bludgeon her to death close at hand, Juliet and Pauline were quickly arrested, and later confessed to the killing. Their motive? A plan to escape to the United States to become writers, and Honora’s determination to keep them apart. Their incredible story made shocking headlines around the world and would provide the subject for Peter Jackson’s Academy Award–nominated film, Heavenly Creatures. 

A sensational trial followed, with speculations about the nature of the girls’ relationship and possible insanity playing a key role. Among other things, Parker and Hulme were suspected of lesbianism, which was widely considered to be a mental illness at the time. This mesmerizing book offers a brilliant account of the crime and ensuing trial and shares dramatic revelations about the fates of the young women after their release from prison. With penetrating insight, this thorough analysis applies modern psychology to analyze the shocking murder that remains one of the most interesting cases of all time.

My Thoughts: 

I'm playing catch up on reviews so I'm going to just do a quick bullet point on this one. 

• I don't remember where I first heard about this book but the idea that a well-known author had been involved in a murder as a young woman intrigued me. How, I wondered, had she gotten past that to become a respected writer? 
• By the time I actually got around to reading the book, I'd forgotten that Anne Perry was actually Juliet Hulme and thought that she was involved in some other way. Except that I always, always look at the photo inserts in a book before I start reading so I quickly figured it out. 
• Both Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker had difficult childhoods that caused them to have attachment issues with their mothers. Neither mother was ideal - Honorah Rieper ran hot and cold and Hilda Hulme struggled to connect with her daughter at all. Juliet was considered quite pretty and very bright - she thought perhaps even more highly about herself because of this than did anyone else. Both girls clearly struggled with mental health issues. 
• That being said, so little was known about mental health as recently as the 1950's that both doctors and the judicial system struggled to explain how two girls who showed no remorse and clearly understood that what they did was wrong could also be mentally ill. Also, the idea that these two young ladies might be lesbians was a big story - inherently this seemed to make them worse people but did it mean that they were just worse people or even more mentally ill? It seemed that it must be one or the other. 
• If this happened today, it would still be big, international news. We'd still struggle with the idea of matricide and how two young girls could be so remorseless. 
• As bad as the penal system was in the 1950's, as terrible as the conditions in the places where these young women were sent were, they were both allowed to continue their educations and actually served very little time, relative to the crime they'd committed. What was even more strange was the fact that they were both treated so differently when they were released. Parker was force to stay in New Zealand on parole, while Hulme (who took on the name Perry because her mother had taken that name on after she became involved with a new man by that name) was allowed to travel to Britain. 
• The two women dealt with the aftermath of what they had done very differently. Parker appeared to be very repentant and lived a quiet, religious life, trying to stay out of the spotlight. Perry (whose name evolved to Anne Perry) was able to live without anyone knowing about her past and became quite wealthy and well known with her writing. In many interviews, after it was discovered who she was, she showed very little remorse. 
• Director Peter Jackson got his big break when he and his wife produced a film adaptation of the case. Heavenly Creatures starred Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey. Now I want to track that movie down. 
• Reviews on this one are very mixed. Some think it's terrific. I thought it particularly dragged in the middle and that Graham tried to stuff in everything that he'd learned about the case. At the end of the book, we learned what had happened to all of the people who had played a part in the trial - honestly, I didn't really care. I don't know what that says about me. Did I want it to be more sensational? Not particularly. But I also thought it was a story that should have better held my attention. 

Mini-Review: Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

Read by Kirsten Potter

5 hours, 57 minutes

Published June 2016 by Hogarth Shakespeare Series

Publisher's Summary: 

Kate Battista feels stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister Bunny? Plus, she's always in trouble at work - her pre-school charges adore her, but their parents don't always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner.

Dr. Battista has other problems. After years out in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough. His research could help millions. There's only one problem: his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, all would be lost.

When Dr. Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Kate is furious: this time he's really asking too much. But will she be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to bring her around?

My Thoughts: 

Vinegar Girl is the third book in Random House's Hogarth Shakespeare project, with contemporary writers retelling Shakespeare plays. Vinegar Girl is very loosely based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. 

Here Kate is less a shrew and  more of a woman trapped by circumstances. While she is by no means a willing participant in her father's plot to find a wife for Pyotr to keep him from being deported, she's lured by the idea of a way out of her father's house, out of having to mother her fifteen-year-old sister. Truly, her father is something of a mad scientist, who has the family eating a hash meal every evening, who has no idea how to take care of himself or his youngest, who relies entirely on Kate to keep the household afloat. Can she be abrupt and a little too honest some of the time? Yes, she certainly can. But who can blame her? And Pyotr, while under the impression that he'll be the boss in the marriage, is also quite a nice guy when it comes right down to it. In this version of The Taming of the Shrew, Kate isn't so much broken, as she is presented with an opportunity that allows her to become a better version of her natural self. 

It's a little on the light side; but, overall, I enjoyed it. Now that I've finally gotten around to this one, I'll be looking for others in the series. 

The other books in the project are: 

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, a retelling of The Tempest

Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn, a retelling of King Lear

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson, a retelling of The Winter's Tale

Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson, a retelling of The Merchant of Venice

New Boy by Tracy Chevalier, a retelling of Othello

Life: It Goes On - July 6

Happy Sunday! Hope you have all gotten to have an extra long weekend and enjoyed it. We enjoyed the neighbors' annual fireworks show on Thursday night then got up early Friday to go hear my dad give his annual Fourth of July speech at the facility he lives in. Then we headed down to Kansas City to see Miss H. Came home last evening so that we could have a full day at home to get caught up on things around here before we head back to work tomorrow - love when you can work both fun and productivity in to a weekend. 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I finished Long Island Compromise and started Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers (definitely not my usual read but I'm actually enjoying it - it's the first in his Wallander series).

Watched: Friday night with Miss H we watched several episodes of Dateline and last night a couple of episodes of Shrinking. We're down to one episode and then we'll have to wait months before the next season is released. 

Read: I finally finished Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century and started Elon Hilderbrand's Summerland, expecting something light and fluffy. Nope - starts with the death of Nantucket's bright and shining teen. 

Made: Friday was Miss C's birthday so I made her a German chocolate cake, as well as a second chocolate cake (because I don't like German chocolate cake), and homemade ice cream. 

Enjoyed: Thursday we had Mini-him, Miss C, a couple of their friend, and a couple of our friends over to watch the neighbors' fireworks show and then enjoyed dessert at our place. Friday we got to spend some time with Big Guy's cousin and some of her family (they live not all that far from Miss H) - it's been far to long since we've seen them. Then we went out to dinner with our adopted K.C. family, which is always fun. 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: I have a couple of days off this week, which I'll spend putzing around the house while the crews come in to do their part of the renovations in our kitchen. Counters, sink/faucet and backsplash should be done by this time next weekend. 

Thinking About: Paint colors. Once the counters and backsplash are in, then it's time to start painting (ok, realistically, we should have done that first, but we didn't) and I still haven't decided on colors. The cupboards and walls will all need to be painted. 

Feeling: Excited and nervous - what if I hate what I picked out once it's installed?! 

Looking forward to: Another long weekend - I have been so bad about taking time off and the burn out is  really starting to show. 

Question of the week: Have you ever painted kitchen cupboards? We are going to do them ourselves, which might be the thing I'm most nervous about.